Some new virtualization technology that’s starting to mature nicely that enterprises and developers should start looking at:
The Cloud Foundry is an open source initiative for building platform neutral Platform as a Service (PaaS) environments. Sponsored by VMware (or purchased or something like that), the concept is similar to Azure, providing the underlying platform that can be deployed to create custom elastic clouds and eliminating much of the make work involved in managing the OS and middleware stacks.
The initial offering is based on a Linux VM, and supporting a number of popular development and delivery environments such as Ruby, PHP, Python and Node.js. The two other players, Iron Foundry and Stackato are extensions of the open sourced code to cover some additional use cases.
Iron Foundry brings the architecture to the Windows world and brings full integration with .NET development and deployment. But as you will be deploying Windows VMs, you’ll need to take the licence costs into account. But for Windows shops that are full-in on .NET, this offers an interesting option.
Stackato comes from the folks over at ActiveState who have been the stewards of ActivePerl for years now and bring a number of extensions to the base Cloud Foundry environment including Perl, Clojure, Scala, Erlang. Additional benefits for the enterprise are a fully-supported toolkit, a more advanced security model, more granular user management, and system and application monitoring with New Relic integrated directly in the package.
It’s well worth spending a few moments reading over the FAQs and taking them for a test drive to understand just how this can simplify application management and deployment without tying your applications to a particular hosting service or cloud application stack. The VMs composing these clouds can be deployed locally for development work and testing, on private virtualization solutions like VMware vSphere for internal clouds or Amazon EC2 for public clouds or just about any hosting provider out there.
This is looking like the logical future for developing and deploying web apps while maintaining a maximum level of ownership and flexibility